OUIL405 Studio Brief 2 - Tell an Untold Story pt 1 The Visual Journalist

High Royds

Second day out.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                For my second trip out i went down to High Royds Village which it is now known. This place was only turned into a village in the last 10 years before this it was a mental health hospital which had a few different names but probably the most known one is West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum which was closed on 25 February 2003. Before this tho it was a hospital which opened in 1888 and was to house the mentally ill which it did for many years. over this time period many storeys have come out from the hospital be it from patients or staff, and some of the stories you hear are truly mind blowing and disturbing.  

I have grown up not too far from where High Royds is situated and have explored its ground way before it shut up as a hospital and well after its closure. Most of this time spent in the grounds would probably be classed as some kind of criminal act but we were just having fun and trying to find out if the rumours and stories we and heard could possibly of been true.  We definitely found some very disturbing and messed up stuff on these adventures including padded holding cells, burnt out grand ball rooms, a mortuary with dissecting table, even having a patients of the hospital appar out of the bushes in the middle of the night with a football wanting to know if we wanted  a game with him (very scary) but he was harmless.
But this is nothing compared to the horror stories we had been told as children about the place.        

This is the main building you come to as you make your way up the long drive way. Also on this page are some of the facts i have found out about the hospital and  drawing of the brain as this is what the hospital liked to mend. 

 (Indian Ink and pencil)

This sheet has a drawing of a broken bit of tile i found at the site which looked like it was part of a much larger decorative piece and was blue. The top right is a drawing of the building in which the monarchy room and table was situated, and the bottom left is the silhouette of the roof tops in the evening sky. 

 (Indian Ink, Watercolour paint)

Top left is one of the old building which has not been demolished just renovated in to new apartments and still hold its grandness which it was build with back in 1888. 

This was a quick sketch i did from my van sat on the front seats to see if i could capture how grand the clock tower look through the trees that are planted to the right hand side of the building, but even in my van it was so very cold i found it hard to draw in them freezing conditions.


Due to major budget cuts in the economy by them dam torys this story has had to be stopped due to severe lack of funds in the research department, but don't fear we are heading in a new direction still using the research we already have but putting it to a different use. MAPS coming soon.

OUIL405 Studio Brief 2 - Tell an Untold Story pt 1 The Visual Journalist

 Esholt Woods


On my first journey out i went on a massive walk with my trusted beast Brooklyn the Beagle (my dog).

We decided to revisit some of the places i used to be taken on walks and told stories of when i was a child.  First we went to see the old railway line that was Opened 26.2.1894 and closed in 10.8.1964 it ran between yeadon and guiseley my home owns. On arriving at the site it was clear to me  it had changed dramatically over the years, it was now a tarmacked path used by dog walkers and cyclists and nothing like what i could remember it been like when i was a child, with railway sleepers piled high next to a sandy lane and all sorts of old railway treasures. Nope now it was a single strip of black tarmac with only the old bridges still remaining.

So i decided to scrap the railway line and head down to my local woods which is full of history and a massive waste water treatment plant. I spent a good 4 hours walking round, drawing/sketching and getting to know the woods a bit more. On my walk i discovered a lot of little hidden visual surprises growing out of the landscape or just build there with no consideration to the landscape.

A warning sign that looks like it is covered with bullet holes of some kind.

A warning sign and i think some kind of valve.

A old lamp post just in the middle of the trees with nothing else man made around it. 

 I went to find a old mill that used to be in the center of the woods but is now just the foundations and a few old little bridges. This is the bridge that is next to the old mill it has steps buried into the side of the hill that lead to it on both side, i have also heard that this was the site of the mills water wheel but this is long done.

One of a few bridges that pass through the woods carrying the rail lines that link Leeds and Bradford train stations with Ilkley and the towns in between.

This is a tunnel exit that carries water under the near by housing estate and farmers fields and joins to the stream that travels through the woods and enters another larger tunnel at the other end of the woods and goes into the water treatment plant i think. 

I feel it was a very successful trip with many drawings done and facts learnt, but also some of the main sites I wanted to see are not very visible now so this resulted in limited main vocal points and has made me dout my intentions of tell the story of the woods. 

My boots at the end of the walk (why not add them)

College Poster

We were asked to produce a poster made from college. I had a go with cutting out of newspapers and magazines but i found that I was very limited in what i could create as to what was on had to use for the images.  So I thought it was time I learnt more about using Adobe Photoshop as I still only have a basic understanding of how the program works. So I set about producing a few ideas and for some reason my hatred of the Conservative party started taken over and spilling out on to the page, but i feel this happened as the newspapers are full of they propaganda as most of their rich friends own the papers but that's a rant for another day. So i took a step back reassessed and set out to produce a college style poster for a northern soul night. 

At the time i was thinking about ideas for this poster i was watching one of my favorite films KES and from that i thought using a northern accent in my poster would do for the northern part of northern soul. Then the soul part had to be the soul of a wellington boot as in the north we all wear wellies because we are all farmers. But i found they need some sort of face so people could relate to them so i just search and found nice teeth images and some googly eyes and of course the Flat cap whats more northern then the flat cap, and bam a northern soul.


When doing this again instead of using images found on search engines I will try and create my own images to be used like taking photos of boot souls or scanning them in, the same for all the bits of the poster, maybe even doing the speech an bubbles by hand and scanning them in or using a graphics tablet. The background i feel lets this poster down as i could have a countryside image there or some more interesting then just yellow.